Many dental practices can appear very busy, but over the years, when I have drilled down into my client's numbers (pardon the pun), I have found many were underproducing by as much as 40% or more based on their production capacity. For a practice to produce at the highest level it is capable of, the key has everything to do with your staff and your skills in leading and managing them. The practice owner From a management viewpoint, the biggest problem in most dental offices is the practice owner. Why? Because most dentists want to be Dr. Nice with their staff....

The Achilles' heel of many a dental practice owner is to avoid dealing with unpleasant staff situations. A good example is a recent new client of mine.  I found him to be very congenial, so I had a hard time believing this guy was the "dental devil incarnate” described by the majority of his staff. I asked each of the staff members in his practice the same question: "Has anyone in the practice been treated unjustly?” All fingers pointed to one person—we'll call her Sally. Sally had apparently been going around telling other staff members about how the practice owner was...

Not knowing how to run an effective staff meeting can have some negative consequences in the overall health of your dental practice. We’ve found that many offices don’t have meetings at all. When they do, we often find that nobody gets anything out of them since poorly organized staff meetings can easily turn into gripe sessions that waste everyone’s time. Staff meetings, or team huddles, should be useful and routine, not organized as emergencies because someone is upset or a team member has made a mistake. Calling a meeting for these reasons is usually ineffective and can actually be damaging. Staff meetings that aren’t...

1. Time is money It is the small things that add up to consuming vast amounts of time, and as we all know: Time is money. Too often, staff members look busy but are in fact simply handling unnecessary work they needlessly generate caused by inefficiencies, lack of training, and so on. Some examples that generate unnecessary work are listed below: Lab case is not in the office when the patient arrives.A message is taken but not given to the correct person.A patient leaves the office without an appointment.   The patient's phone number is incorrect.There is incomplete information in charts.Incomplete...